Firstly, I would like to highlight some opinions of UX (and UCD) themes in evidence in the last 6 months:

The purists – those who believe UX should be kept out of the advertising agency world (Merholz and Bowles).

The integrators – those who feel that UX must play a part in communication of a product or brand and be an integral element of an ad agency (Abby the IA and Karen McGrane)

The skeptics – those who don’t believe in UX being a discipline at all (Ryan Carson).

The naysayers – those who believe UCD (and indirectly UX) is a waste of time and even misleading in terms of creating a truly innovative solution (Skibsted and Hansen)

Eric Reiss in the Journal of IA took a balanced and considered view to these opinions. Framing them with a sense of perspective and presenting some deeper thoughts about UX and the role of IA in all of this. I particularly like his focus on business reality and the clarion call to embrace Information Architecture as the label that defines what we really do;

Ultimately, it will be our understanding of disciplines both within and beyond IA, that will ensure us a place at the table around which the big decisions are made.

Why UX must be present in the advertising industry

I think it’s important to reaffirm why we should not have an elitist view of UX and why IA is at the very core of the user experience collection of disciplines.

Clearleft and Adaptive Path do excellent work as UX design companies. But they are a minority in a huge marketplace of varied design companies and to say that UX doesn’t have a place in other types of business is contradictory to their usual UX evangelism. Isn’t it much better having people in all sorts of businesses doing information architecture and interaction design under the umbrella of UX?

In the company I work at, we are growing our UX offering around a product and it is a slow but sure process of convincing people that this approach (with the right designers) can really work for their business. However, we must also embark on communication and design work as our market is not as big or as mature as the US or UK. These are driven by the need for business survival but it also ensures we have diverse viewpoints on our projects. Different perspectives provide value.

The concept of baked-in marketing

…there are so many opportunities for engagement through interaction, conversation, utility and actual *use* between the initial message and the product itself.

A day before Peter Merholz posted his view on UX and advertising, Andrew Hinton highlighted that product development and communication go hand in hand. This closer alignment will have repercussions for UX – pushing it into mainstream design consciousness. Just about every design pursuit will need to look at wider issues that surround the customer and product. Companies will strive to engage, to create interaction. Creating users who become customers.

Service design is the natural progression from UX – taking interactions across platforms and concentrating on the invisible and tangible connections around customer or user interactions. Information architects should be at the heart of this design work and don’t be surprised to start to see IAs appear in companies that you didn’t even think of as ‘digital’.

Let’s also remember that this isn’t just the domain of designers but all stakeholders. We must realize UX work is done by those who do not call themselves designers. This can have both good and bad sides but if there are more people who know what we are talking about, in the right domains, this can only be for the good.

Design practice – risk and innovation

The reality of the times, is that a business needs to innovate and create better products, faster than before. But they need to mitigate risk, and UX methods offer a way of backing this up with real and relevant data. It seems at this stage to be a correct and considered way to ensure you have the right approach.

But the caveat is how to interpret data from users and it can be a minefield. The best designers will filter and discard many findings and see the real gold in reams of user interviews. This level of skill is learnt through experience. The ability to be a synthesiser of data and create meaningful relationships between themes is a core quality of any designer.

Conceptual work needs verification with customers at some stage and even Apple does this before they go to market. So to say they do not listen to users is a fallacy. They have conducted ethnographic studies with their customers, observing them using their products in their homes and offices for weeks.

The amount of data they acquire from these sessions would warrant a convincing case to not go for persona creation or user interviews, ever. They pretty much know how people feel about and use their products, so for them to innovate they need to pick up on areas that are hinted at by user comments and their behaviours through their usage. Concepts that are achievable by being verified with customers who have previously talked about the ‘what ifs’ and the ‘nice to haves’.

Action research and design doing

Negating risk by investing in research that is actionable is a shrewd move, especially in a marketplace where customers are more vocal and more likely to be persuaded by peers than ever before. For business, the value of UX can be seen in exploring hypotheses backed up by quantitativeand qualitative research.

Optimization, concept creation and execution on innovative ideas can all be handled and explored by UX teams. Considered product developments and the tangible tools to be innovative, create real business value.

Software design, integrated service design and product design all benefit from design research. In my opinion UCD is purely another way of obtaining the right information. I wouldn’t design anything without ensuring a brief that included as much background information as possible. Would you?

Design thinking is one thing but design doing is a far more powerful act for business. A necessary part of this act is to gain real insights from user (or customer) research.

Envisioning the future by studying the present

It is not just interface design. It is not just about making the world more usable and ethically correct. It’s all this and more. It is a force for changing business in its approach and to make it economically stable by providing for needs but also satisfying wants beyond the present day. This is the business value of UX. How you interpret the data you collect, and create something truly unique, relies on the teams skill set and experience.

All of this leads me back to my belief that UCD as a philosophy and UX (and especially IA) form the foundation for the best products and service design. A whitepaper was released as I wrote this, defining UX – written by academics, practitioners and industry. It would be good if this were a full stop to the infighting and misinformation the discipline faces, but somehow I doubt it.

Last week I was in Paris for an entertaining, yet equally perplexing Euro IA. The majority of talks were a thought provoking foray into the usual domains of information architecture but also service design and co-creation.

The opening keynote from Oliver Reichenstein was a strange experience, part personal take on the field and part philosophical reflection on how he personally arrived at his own professional destination.

I am an admirer of his work and yet elements of those great data visualizations and experiments (the web trend maps) were not mentioned here. He did attempt to explain his user experience diagram but after claiming metaphors were only useful to a point, he then likened IA to ‘the recipe for user experience’. This gastronomic reference, was a recurring theme throughout the two days.

Contradiction seemed to be the order of the day. On the one hand stating that he found IA used too many ‘bullshit’ terms that were unhelpful, he then described his own design process as ‘dialectic’. I find philosophy in alignment to IA has never been helpful to our profession. It doesn’t resonate with me as thought-through – ‘the architecture of the mind’ that Reichenstein holds up as one of his views is unhelpful to a layman and really only strengthens the opinion of those who feel that IA is intangible. Even Reichenstein says that ‘if you stretch metaphors they break’.

Ian Fenn wrote a fictitious tweet, and yet ironically it was exactly what it felt like after he delivered his keynote.

It was a shame that this opportunity was lost of convincing the group that he didn’t just use the term because he liked the phrase. But unfortunately that seemed the real reason if you take the talk at face value.

His comment that ‘strong IA feels real’ was ironic, as this ia felt unreal, unrealistic and abstract. Even if it works for him and his company, I felt he didn’t tell the whole story.

I think therefore IA…Other talks also reflected the philosophical aspect. Koen Claes focussed on designing for memory (enjoyable but try selling that to a CEO). Peter Bogaards talked about the similarity with gastronomy to aspects of what we do as UX people.

All thought-provoking stuff but really it had the feeling of some in-joke that only UX people would get, and that those from other communities who were present, the product managers, marketing and developers would look on and question.

This is not a practical application or useful in my opinion and after talking to a few attendees after day one they felt the same. These talks gave more attention to the experience of being human than the thing that we design. Though the two are obviously connected, it becomes too indiscernible from existentialism.

Lean IA, service design and Ubicomp The second day proved far better, more real and more tangible. More useful to talk about how to design in an agile way, using co-creation and the methods and skills found in the scrum processes of product development teams.

Here Jeff Gothelf, Johanna Kollmann and Franco Papeschi proved that the application of our skill set is the most important thing in our domain. The tools and methods are fine but not as important as engaging the team, working collaboratively and transparently and being an agent for change.

Their approaches were the exact opposite to the mysterious design master. This is the future of UX, with Claire Rowland and Chris Browne representing service design and ubicomp in a very comprehensive, fascinating talk.

Christophe Tallec also talked about how the theory of the wisdom of crowds, has usefully been applied to a product. These emerging fields becoming more relevant every year, and I guess in the not too distant future these fields will become facets of the same discipline.

Aimless ends The closing plenary was given by Paul Kahn where he stated that Facebook was not important to him. But with its 500 million users and a previous slide stating how the biggest sites are user generated it just seemed he was being provocative for the sake of it.

As he ambled through several sites that he liked, it was similar to surfing a smashing magazine post of cool dataviz sites. The structured and non structured aspect of metadata is well documented but the talk really just seemed to meander without purpose.

His closing message that user-centred design is best tackled by saying ‘you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink’ was uninspiring. Did this statement derive from too many failed projects? One he showed – though it used a neat UI trick it was where he openly admitted he didn’t have numbers to know if it was effective or not. Who knows?

Summing up There were a lot of great presentations and Martin Belam has gathered the talks on his site and are well worth a look. But keynotes are from thought leaders. Surely they have a responsibility to not use the platform as a casual debate (or product promotion) with throw away comments?

Or perhaps that is their call, but I do ask as an attendee for the speakers to prepare the material and avoid being self-indulgent or misleading. Give us something real. Give back something tangible to this community.

I remember last year being at a talk where a student pleaded – ‘give us something we can use’. From the keynotes, I was left with the same feeling…

After Jeff Jarvis had his take on Google we had somebody from the inside – Bradley Horowitz.Horowitz was the man who advised Yahoo to buy Flickr and after redefining his role there he made them acquire Delicious. Previously he had formed Virage (video categorization engine) and sold it to Autonomy after dropping out of his degree at MIT Medialab where he worked on image categorisation technologies. (more…)

I read a post recently that illustrated how concept models are rarely used in the right way and are often misunderstood. Are they really worth doing at all?

Now seems a good time to expand on the tool that Dan Brown has popularised through his book Communicating Design. Not as simply a stand alone tool but one that can provide a blueprint for giving solid ROI on design, analytics and testing.

When you organise content on a web site, how can you be confident its relevant and clear for your users? The following walk-through tells of how you can ensure you build a site with users’ interests at heart.

What is a taxonomy?

The term ‘taxonomy’ is a bit of a misnomer, having its origins in Biological study denoting sub-species within a species classification. However, in the business sense of the word, taxonomies can encompass a whole range of different elements that, broadly speaking, are ways of classifying content under categories recognised by a user group.

Synthesis of research, business culture and product goals ensures a UX team sits in the middle of a web development process. However the team can benefit by not being solely project focused…

User experience is heavily associated with brand experience and as technology becomes less visible and more pervasive, the two elements will converge into one. User experience adds substance to the brand experience – experience design defines the brand.

This post started from the ideas of a two-part post written last year by Seth Gottlieb & Brice Dunwoodie. It made me think about a list of tools and techniques that content editors could use whilst editing in a collaborative environment.The post is a point of reference for those involved in the daily running and development of sites that are continually evolving.